Google's Larry Page: MY SECRET TO VAST WEALTH, SUCCESS

Google chief Larry Page has shared the secret to his success: the billionaire search engine nerd reckons companies must make their products TEN times better than their rivals to be successful.

The grinning geek, worth about $20bn, also believes his fellow biz barons should hardly ever think about their opponents when coming up with "moon shot" ideas, such as Google's project to build cars that safely drive themselves.

"It’s hard to find actual examples of really amazing things that happened solely due to competition," Page said in a WiReD mag interview. The Google co-founder added:

Companies fail because they do the wrong things or they aren’t ambitious, not because of litigation or competition.

However Page wasn't above handing out a few snarky remarks about Facebook and Apple. Even before Mark Zuckerberg's social network announced Graph Search - a shot at Google's search supremacy - Page said Facebook is "doing a really bad job on their products", adding that the Google+ social network was not introduced simply to knock Facebook down a peg or two.

We have all this money, we have all these people, why aren’t we doing more stuff? You may say that Apple only does a very, very small number of things, and that’s working pretty well for them. But I find that unsatisfying.

He also brushed aside the patent "thermonuclear war" instigated by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs against Google's mobile operating system Android: "How well is that working?" Page mused.

And he dropped in a coy reference to how good Google Maps is after the kerfuffle with Apple's crap maps app: "We’ve been working on Maps for a long time, and it’s nice to see people realise that we’ve put a lot of effort and investment into it. That’s clearly more appreciated now." ®